Site Isolation in Firefox
blog.mozilla.org
Site Isolation in Firefox
1–10 of 118 posts
Re: Site Isolation in Firefox
#2Can anyone explain the relationship to the Firefox "Electrolysis" initiative better than this[0]? It looks like Electrolysis was just making the browser kernel IPC layer and now Fission is actually divvying up the processes by origin.
Re: Site Isolation in Firefox
#3Can anyone explain the relationship to the Firefox "Electrolysis" initiative better than this[0]? It looks like Electrolysis was just making the browser kernel IPC layer and now Fission is actually divvying up the processes by origin. [0]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Thanks
hi, co-author of the blog post here. There is a more detailed blog post explaining how Site Isolation is better than the Electrolysis architecture here - https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/05/introducing-firefox-new-si... (also linked to from the security blog post). Hope this is helpful!
Re: Site Isolation in Firefox
#4When Chrome was new and shiny, I used it for a time. Then, the first time I found myself needing to kill Chrome because it was completely locked up, I found myself staring at a wall of chrome processes in the task list, not knowing which one I needed to kill. At the time, I thought the idea of a separate process for each tab was silly. Though, with Firefox moving towards this model, I guess the engineers at Google were prescient in the correctness of that tradeoff.
I do use a lot of tabs, so I fear I'm going to find myself facing the same problem I faced with Chrome: a site misbehaves and locks things up, crap, which process do I kill? A way of tracking which tab maps to which process would be nice, so the next time I trip over a badly-coded page, I don't have to kill everything just to get my browser to respond again. Lazyweb question to y'all: is there a feature in Chrome or Firefox that can do this (mapping tab/page -> process), or have I just stumbled upon a side-project idea?
Re: Site Isolation in Firefox
#5Could anyone here who has been using it report their experience with site isolation turned on? Do you find anything it breaks or makes more difficult? Has it altered your privacy/security practices (in terms of addons, other settings, etc.)?
Re: Site Isolation in Firefox
#6This provides more technical details: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/05/introducing-firefox-new-si...>, which should be more interesting to HN than a marketing announcement.
In particular, it seems that "site" isn't precisely defined. It seems to be based on domains, but backed by a human-curated list of "sites": https://github.com/publicsuffix/list>.
So it's different than Chrome's "every webpage gets a separate process".
Re: Site Isolation in Firefox
#7Can anyone explain the relationship to the Firefox "Electrolysis" initiative better than this[0]? It looks like Electrolysis was just making the browser kernel IPC layer and now Fission is actually divvying up the processes by origin. [0]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Thanks
hi, co-author of the blog post here. There is a more detailed blog post explaining how Site Isolation is better than the Electrolysis architecture here - https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/05/introducing-firefox-new-si... (also linked to from the security blog post). Hope this is helpful!
Thanks for this link. Not sure how I missed it when it's the very last word, haha.
I'm not sure what gave me the impression but, in my mind "process-per-tab" and "Electrolysis" were linked, but that was a misconception:
>In great detail, (as of April 2021) Firefox’s parent process launches a fixed number of processes: eight web content processes, up to two additional semi-privileged web content processes, and four utility processes for web extensions, GPU operations, networking, and media decoding.
>While separating content into currently eight web content processes already provides a solid foundation, it does not meet the security standards of Mozilla because it allows two completely different sites to end up in the same operating system process and, therefore, share process memory. To counter this, we are targeting a Site Isolation architecture that loads every single site into its own process.
Re: Site Isolation in Firefox
#8When Chrome was new and shiny, I used it for a time. Then, the first time I found myself needing to kill Chrome because it was completely locked up, I found myself staring at a wall of chrome processes in the task list, not knowing which one I needed to kill. At the time, I thought the idea of a separate process for each tab was silly. Though, with Firefox moving towards this model, I guess the engineers at Google we…
sounds like page "about:processes" in Firefox would be super helpful in this case! you can use it to unload tabs and kill processes.
Re: Site Isolation in Firefox
#9When Chrome was new and shiny, I used it for a time. Then, the first time I found myself needing to kill Chrome because it was completely locked up, I found myself staring at a wall of chrome processes in the task list, not knowing which one I needed to kill. At the time, I thought the idea of a separate process for each tab was silly. Though, with Firefox moving towards this model, I guess the engineers at Google we…
On Firefox you can go to `about:processes`.
It lists tabs by process, and includes the PID (on Linux; no idea about other platforms). You can also directly kill tabs and processes from there.
Re: Site Isolation in Firefox
#10When Chrome was new and shiny, I used it for a time. Then, the first time I found myself needing to kill Chrome because it was completely locked up, I found myself staring at a wall of chrome processes in the task list, not knowing which one I needed to kill. At the time, I thought the idea of a separate process for each tab was silly. Though, with Firefox moving towards this model, I guess the engineers at Google we…
Shift+Esc brings out Chrome task manager where you can kill individual tabs/pages by name.